I have been trying to promote my online store and I have been getting lots of hits but no sales my site is http://www.ridgewaydiscount.com I recieve about 300 hits a week. does anyone know how I could improve my sales.

300 Hits a week means nothing. Its all about where your hits are coming from. Where are your hits coming from?

I can tell you that your site could use some work. It is very scattered and somewhat hard to navigate. Your design tells me nothing about what the site is about. The nav buttons are somewhat hard to read. Your page could use some padding.

Also, when I first visited your site, I thought you sold only auto parts. You gave no mention of what your site is all about. Perhaps an little intro about what it is you sell, along with why I should by from you, would be helpful.

On another note, I would probably never buy from you. I like to buy from companies that specialize. If I want auto parts, I would go to a site that sells only auto parts. If I want computer parts, I would go to a site that specializes in computers. I think you should pick one or two related markets instead of trying to sell everything.

Just my thoughts.

Sam

When you say hits do you literally mean hits as reported by your stats program or do you mean visits? I ask because a hit is any request of the server. Your home page is showing 46 images so every visit is generating about 50 hits. 300 hits in one week would mean about 6 visits to your site.

If it's only 6 visits then you probably need more traffic, though as Sam said above it's not just the traffic, but the quality of the traffic. Where the traffic is from, how likely they are to buy, how interested they are in your products, etc.

If you are getting 300 visits then it's likely more to do with the site itself not getting people to buy.

Both the site and traffic can always be improved, but if you can offer more details about your stats we can pinpoint which is the more probably cause for a lack of sales.

Yeah, nobody counts hits when referring to traffic, what you need to know is the number of visitors.

Obviously your goal is to find people who might be interested in purchasing automotive parts and accessories.

You might have some inside knowledge in this area that you could share that would be helpful to others. I suggest you learn how to write some articles and press releases related to the automotive industry and your website.

Submit these to article directories under the "automotive" category. That alone, if done consistently, can bring more visitors to your website.

Next you might want to consult someone about making your site more focused so that it converts better.

First revalue the quality of your hits. And if your visitors are hot targeted leads, then next you'll need a lot more than 300 hits. That's my two cents.

I think the site is really well presented.

And Ridgeway is an excellent name for a cat, unrelatedly.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...aydiscount.com

your audience size is...

0.000002% of 1 billion, which is

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...e+Search&meta=

20 people


That means when you say "300 hits a day" you probably mean you are getting that figure from some source like stats, probably 273 of them are google, the others are yahoo and msn!

you have 20 users.


20 people are unlikely to buy anything between em.

you have loads of products

do you know any html or perl or php or asp?

perl is the best. anyway. what you can do is make your pages into objects more likely to list on google...

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...G=Search&meta=

you have 25 pages listed and probably 1000s of products... how come google doesn't have 1000s of pages, each with an individual product you are selling? easy. you have not taken the trouble to make sure google does that.

hell i've listed 240,000 pages on google, at one time, out of a productbase of about 3 million, and i made bugger all out of it, perhaps because they were generic product feeds from affiliates, but i had more than 25 pages listed!

assuming you're not just selling generic product-feed products for affiliates, your unique product pages are very profitable if you make them findable

the way to do it is to make sure that a robot can navigate from the front page and quickly reach all internal pages, link by link.

listen mate. you look like you sell **** loads of products at rock bottom prices. if you are shifting these items from your own company and are profiting completely, then i'd like to cash in. i can get sales for you and you can pay me via paypal a commission. i don't think it'll be not against forum rules to just swap email addresses out in the open, so PM me and in a week or two when i come back, i'll reply.

i like 10% if you can handle that.

i need to know what you actually sell successfully already, offline.

the top selling types of product, and the "shopping cart size" of your average customer for such products. then i can buy traffic for you so you get sales straight away from the traffic. you can pay me a cut. this sort of relationship is generally known as affiliate marketing and usually you have to pay about 3k to a network to be allowed to do business with me, but i'm up for anything, if it pays and it's legal.

actually ignore my sophistry

alexa says a site i am currently sending about 900 people a month to, is the same % reach as yours!

and i'm making about 6000 dollars of sales a month for that particular site

so maybe you really do have 300 users - where are you getting them - why are you calling them users? what shows them to be users. you need to be sure you are dealing with human individuals and that they're in the right part of the world - what you sell maybe be visited, for any number of reasons, by a korean, but are you able to do anything at all with him/her?

alexa's pretty lame, though, eh?

although to be fair it's a 3 month average and that site was doing badly in august and july

still, the average over 3 months is still about 100 at least

either way alexa's data presentation has clearly got a weakness and room for big errors!

so the question is this -

did you have "300 hits a week" 3 months ago, and 2 months ago, or is it VERY recent, this surge. and are you sure they are humans and can buy your goods?

if all those conditions ARE met then there is a very strong possibility that your point of sale has a fault. that would be easy to know because it would involve never ever having got a single sale at all, even after leaving it running for months.

have you tried buying something from yourself?

why, though, am i writing this stuff, when i get so much more money if i close this window and go back to my work?

i really don't know.

can anyone help me figure out that quandary.

is it a weakness or strength? this human need to somehow always defy what is merely rational and to seek far too much from life. i'd be better off getting lost and making more money. and let's face it. it's about that time. 3 posts, unless you're talking about iraq or the economy, is quite enough. like weatabix.